GE Fanuc Extends Open and Layered Approach to Include the Adoption of OPC Unified Architecture

GE Fanuc Automation, Inc., a unit of GE Industrial, announces that it is building its next generation Proficy solutions based on the new OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standards released by the OPC Foundation.

The announcement was made at ARC Advisory Group’s 14th Annual Forum “Driving Enterprise Performance Through Next Generation Manufacturing Concepts.”

“This effort is an extension of the Open and Layered approach that we have been using for years with our Proficy software,” said Pete Sage, GE Fanuc Chief Software Architect. “GE Fanuc is committed to supporting standards as a key element of our product development strategy and OPC helps us with that.

“The real advantage is for the customer,” Sage continued. “By taking a standards-based approach to product development, interoperability with best-of-breed products becomes simpler. As the industry standardizes on ISA-95 for data models and OPC UA to talk to those data models, it becomes simpler for multiple vendors’ products to work together.”

GE Fanuc is a founding member of OPC and an active participant in the development of the OPC UA specification. The specification is a result of analysis and design to develop a standard interface to facilitate the development of servers and clients by multiple vendors that can subsequently interoperate.

www.gefanuc.com